news blog

Used for seconds. Here for centuries.

The first takeaway sushi restaurant opened in Melbourne in 1995. Since then, single-use soy sauce fish have become a familiar sight — and an all-too-common source of plastic pollution. South Australia​​​​​​​ has already banned these plastic sauce containers, but the rest of Australia hasn’t caught up.

In 2024, BeachPatrol & Love Our Street volunteers recorded 2,819 sauce packets in the Litter Stopper app — about eight every day from the few who logged them. The real number littering our streets and beaches is far higher.

At Kananook Beach in Seaford, 11 audits found more than 12,000 littered items across just nine square metres of sand. 3198 Seaford BeachPatrol ‘Nurdle Anymore!’ Report estimated more than 5,000 single-use soy sauce fish are littered along the 1.2 km stretch of beach.

Action You Can Take Next time you buy sushi, ask for no plastic soy sauce fish. Encourage your local shop to ask customers first before adding sauce packets, and to provide a shared glass bottle instead. If South Australia can ban them, Victoria can too.

Shared bottles or refillable pumps — like the sauce stations at IKEA or beside your Bunnings snag — are simple, hygienic alternatives. Soy sauce is salt-based; it doesn’t need to be individually packaged. Five seconds of convenience shouldn’t create 500 years of waste.

Click on view PDF to read the full article, by Jaqui O'Leary (Leader 3198 Seaford BeachPatrol)